A Minecraft Fanfiction,
From A Collection of Short Stories,
The Spiders Of Under
By Scribe191
Dear Reader,
Welcome!
If this is your first time reading an story of mine, let me introduce myself.
Those who know me call me the Scribe, No. 191.
I have lived many lifetimes. The cycle of death and rebirth is something all too familiar to me. Many have asked me my age, upon discovering that I, in one sense, am immortal. My answer is that I have forgotten.
Like my true name, both has been lost over the eons. To the ravages of time or to the numerous changes man has made to their society, I do not and will never know.
What I do know is that my years have been marked with uncountable events, both remarkable and unremarkable. All are insignificant in the grand scheme of things in the cosmic universe. But together, they form a great tale, most likely the greatest tale ever told. An epic tale that will be sung by bards in all dingy taverns across the lands, a tale told by every woman to their children, a tale that will be forever etched into the hearts of the people.
Together they will form a Collection of Short Stories.
But enough of all this talk. The time for words is over! It is time for the adventure to...
BEGIN!
~ Scribe, No. 191
The Backstory:
This particular tale takes place in the sleepy town of Little Dale, about five to six decades after it was established. Little Dale is a town that had sprung up around a successful mining outpost, earning much of its income from exporting coal.
I managed to garner this story from a particularly frightened girl. Judging from the wounds she had received, she had been bitten no less than four times by a particularly huge creature(s). The bites spanned the width of a human adult's forearm, puncturing two and a half inches deep, or six centimeters on average. They were all over her body, ranging from a relatively small bite on her calf to a nasty gaping wound to her left shoulder. Without the expert knowledge I had gathered and scrounged for in my years, she would have died. A very gruesome death most likely would have resulted from succumbing to her wounds.
All the bites seemed to have been inflicted upon her over a range of seven hours. Each bite delivered a cocktail of chemicals. Some of the more fresher wounds still had that mix of chemicals inside them. Intrigued by what this mix of chemicals could be, I used a sowing needle dipped into the substance and stabbed myself with it.
The effects of this substance was... to say the least, unpleasant, at worse, excruciating. I came to the conclusion that it must be a poison. The first stage of its effects were meant to incapacitate, giving the head dizziness and nausea, like an overdose of alcohol mixed with a severe stomachache. The second effect proved to be more disturbing however. The poison then appeared to... digest the victim, slowly dissolving their insides but leaving the skin intact, making the body akin to a wineskin filled with soup.
At least, that is what I concluded after spending a few hours stumbling around my cottage feeling a like drunkard, before clutching my stomach in pain, feeling as I had swallowed fire and it was now burning me to cinders from the inside out.
The girl came round a few days after I rescued her, four-and-twenty hours after I had recovered from my experiment. A few hours after coaxing some herbal broth into her, she managed to calm down and tell me her Story. Naturally, my pen and parchment were already lying on the table. As she talked, I recorded.
She told of a tale that would likely give any other human being nightmares. But I have encountered more horrifying stories in the past. That did not stop me from grimacing as she laid out the gruesome events that had played out.
Apparently, she was a zoologist, studying animals had been her passion. Upon hearing that some of the coal miners had been attacked by some monster on their way back from the surface, she took it upon herself to investigate and possibly document a new species of animal. As she soon discovered, Little Dale apparently had a bit of a...
Spider problem.